Law360’s Zachary Zagger has a nice piece on the FIFA prosecution and quotes, among others, Jack Sharman: “Given this many defendants and the fact that there is going to be at least some who are going to cooperate, it would not surprise me if there wasn’t a second wave of charges or people coming out of the woodwork, people you have not heard of yet,” said Jackson R. Sharman III, a white collar criminal defense attorney with Lightfoot Franklin & White LLC. “If it is going to survive, it is going to have to have a more rigorous compliance structure than some of the items that have come across thus far,”…

In an article by Joel Schectman for the Wall Street Journal and its “Morning Risk Report,” Jack Sharman is interviewed about the idea of a global compliance regime in light of the recent indictments of FIFA officials: Jackson Sharman, a white collar specialist at Lightfoot, Franklin & White LLC, says that the case shows that the notion of a swelling, global compliance culture may be exaggerated. Attorneys and compliance professionals often make the mistake of believing their concerns about bribery are representative of the organizations where they work, he said. “It’s dangerous to assume that a legal regime is being internalized by everybody, because clearly it’s not,” Mr. Sharman said.…

Here’s the ABA White-Collar Crime Committee Winter Spring 2014 Newsletter. Good articles on: INTERNATIONAL WHITE COLLAR CRIME AND DEFERRED PROSECUTION AGREEMENTS CORPORATE COMPLIANCE PROGRAMS IN THE UNITED STATES AND IN ITALY: ARE THEY THE SAME? GIVE ME BACK MY BOOKS AND RECORDS: APPLICATION OF RULE 41(G) IN RESPONSE TO FEDERAL SEARCH AND SEIZURE WARRANTS HOT ISSUES IN CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURES THE BOARD’S ROLE IN ANTI-CORRUPTION COMPLIANCE: GUARDIAN AND GUIDE SEC ARGUES FOR BROAD CONSTRUCTION OF DODD-FRANK ACT WHISTLEBLOWER ANTI-RETALIATION PROVISION DOES THE GREEN LIGHT MEAN GO?: WILL SEC’S NEW RULES FOR SMALL OFFERINGS INCREASE STATE ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS? NEW PROPOSED RULES INCREASE GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES FOR PREVENTING HUMAN…

The interplay between law — especially criminal law — and theology is more subterranean and nuanced than many give it credit for. The same is true of civil law, as here: Contract Law and Reservoir Dogs A contract is an exchange of promises: “I promise to do x if you promise to do y.” Each party must undertake an obligation—called “consideration”—for the contract to be binding. A simple unilateral promise with no consideration (“I will give you my car on Monday”) is not usually binding. These law-rules about obligations in our daily lives provide a contrast to the covenant that the Lord makes with David and to the way that…

The relationship between lacrosse and white-collar crime is not obvious, although for much of its 20th century history the sport was powered by mid-Atlantic and New England prep-school products whose high schools also provided several All-American rosters of white-collar defendants. And even for perfectly lawful activities, there has long been a close relationship between lacrosse and Wall Street, as shown in this 2008 Wall Street Journal article about how On Lacrosse Fields, A Battered Bank Is Still a Player The story of how these Maryland lacrosse players’ case moves into court raises some curious insights, though, into matters of compliance and internal policing, not to mention Fourth and Fifth Amendment…

Except perhaps for “paradigm” and “silo,” the word “culture” is one of the most abused in the vocabulary of compliance, ethics and consultants. (I once heard a consultant say that he needed “a high hover over the silos.” I thought it an ironic mash-up about drones and agriculture; it was not). Yet, “culture” has a meaning in the broader world; in commerce; and in compliance. “Culture” represents a gear-shift in compliance and ethics, and can be smooth or bone-rattling. Consider this story about McKinsey’s culture in the wake of insider-trading scandals: For a quarter of a century, except for a brief stint as a currency analyst at Rothschild, Mr. Barton has…

One would expect fines In civil and criminal enforcement actions to bear some relationship to both the offensive conduct and the statute that authroizes the fine, but that’s rarely the case. Rather, they’re the product of strategy, tactics, raw power and solid horse-trading, as outlined by Professor Peter J. Henning: Fines, Without Explaining How They Were Calculated In particular, Professor Henning notes: For an individual, it is difficult to resist the broad authority granted to the S.E.C. to impose significant monetary penalties. For companies, the civil penalty is more a matter of how much they are willing to pay because limitations on the amount of a penalty seem to be…

This has been a long saga, even by FCA standards: Judge orders Tuomey to pay $276.8 million for Stark, False Claims Act violations (via ModernHealthcare.com). In summary: A federal judge ordered South Carolina’s Tuomey Healthcare System to pay $276.8 million for violating laws that bar hospitals from paying doctors to refer Medicare patients for treatments. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Margaret Seymour ruled against Tuomey (PDF) on virtually every post-trial issue and granted the government’s request to impose $39.3 million in Stark penalties and another $237.5 million in False Claims Act fines. Seymour also rejected Tuomey’s attempts in legal filings to nullify the verdict. The damage amount is believed to…

Two recent articles in @Dealbook are worth noting because of their discussion of what goes into two very important parts of the American enforcement system: deferred prosecution agreements and a prosecutor’s decision to not indict. In For a Better Way to Prosecute Corporations, Look Overseas, Brandon L. Garrett (a professor at University of Virginia School of Law) and David Zaring (an assistant professor of legal studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania) discuss the spread abroad of an American idea — the deferred prosecution agreement: The favored new tool of the corporate prosecutor, the deferred prosecution agreement, is being actively exported to other countries. In these agreements,…

Notes For the Weekend: I tend to agree: No, General Counsels Should Not Be On The Board. The conflicts can be too great. GCs sometimes have a hard enough time, as it is, being honest brokers and, as the saying goes, speaking truth to power. Especially good corruption, bribery and FCPA collection from Corruption Currents (via@WSJRisk). As always, a good summary of white-collar news from @WaltPavlo and 500 Pearl Street. And finally . . . The best “coffee-table” book I have read on martinis is The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic by Barnaby Conrad III: A chilled, crystal…